James Cameron has spent the last two decades inside one of the most elaborate filmmaking machines ever built: years of R&D, new tech, massive visual effects pipelines, and “Avatar” productions that move on a timeline few modern blockbusters can match. But after making a Billie Eilish concert film on a drastically compressed schedule, Cameron sounds newly interested in going in the opposite direction.
Speaking on a recent episode of the Empire podcast, for his new 3D concert doc, “Billie Eilish – Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour,” Cameron said he and Robert Rodriguez are talking about doing something together that would be the extreme opposite of the long-haul “Avatar” model.
“Robert Rodriguez and I are talking about doing something that’s so blindingly fast that, you know, we’re just going to do the whole thing in like 17 days,” Cameron said. “Because I really like the experience on ‘Hit Me Hard and Soft.’ I shot a whole movie in six days. I’m like, what the fuck takes four years?”
Rodriguez is a natural fit for that kind of experiment, and not just because he has long been one of Hollywood’s great speed-and-economy filmmakers. Cameron and Rodriguez already worked together on “Alita: Battle Angel,” with Rodriguez directing and Cameron producing and co-writing the long-gestating sci-fi film. The two have also maintained a visible creative friendship since then, which makes this less like an unlikely pairing and more like two filmmakers circling back to a shared itch: how fast can they move when the machinery is stripped down?
Cameron did not offer a title, plot, genre, timeline, or any indication that the project is formally set. But the comment came as he was discussing what he plans to do while figuring out how to make “Avatar 4” and “Avatar 5” more efficiently—make them “in half the time” for “two-thirds of the cost,” though he added that it would take “a year or so” just to figure out how to do that.
A 17-day Cameron/Rodriguez movie would indeed be a very sharp pivot after years of his maximalist filmmaking. Cameron has spent much of his career pushing scale, technology, and production infrastructure to new extremes, and Rodriguez has long worked from the opposite impulse, finding ways to move quickly, keep control, and make speed part of the creative language. It sounds like the perfect re-team. Hopefully, some details on this tantalizing collaboration will surface soon.
